![]() “One word, ‘nostalgia’, came to our attention as it was once a concept linked to a diagnosable illness associated with the melancholia of homesickness for people who were distant from their home.”īut what of people who are not at a geographic distance from the object of their homesickness? What words are there for people who are watching the earthly elements of their home morph into something that feels remote, while they stay put? Spatially, nostalgia wasn’t right. “With my wife Jill, I sat at the dining table at home and explored numerous possibilities,” he wrote in 2005. ![]() In the early 2000s, a philosopher named Glenn Albrecht at the University of Newcastle in Australia began to look for the words. She called the essay “ Elegy for a country’s seasons.” An elegy is a poem for the dead, a lament. Changes like that were stealing away the steady predictability of Smith’s surroundings, the pacing of a yearly cycle that made the English countryside her ecological home. Climate change had made extreme rainfall more likely for the region. That year, historic floods washed over the UK in the wettest winter England and Wales had seen since record keeping began nearly 250 years prior. The feeling Smith wanted to describe was a type of loss-the loss of her home environment in England. Amid abstract global temperature trends and unfathomable volumes of melted sea ice, the everyday intimacy of climate change goes under-acknowledged. “There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words,” she wrote. In 2014, the writer and critic Zadie Smith published an essay in the New York Review of Books that drew a word-map around the perimeter of a feeling for which she felt we lacked language. ![]()
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